Schubertiade

In their 'Schubertiade', Julian Pregardien and his instrumental friends recreate the special artistic mood one could have felt in Schubert’s day in a Viennese salon. To evoke that atmosphere, they have created a new collage of musical and literary fragments associated with the composer, featuring the unusual combination of flute, baryton and guitar.

Julia Rinderle, born 1990 in Memmingen, studied in Hanover with Roland Krüger, at the Salzburg Mozarteum and in Vienna. She also attended numerous master classes (among others with Emanuel Ax and Paul Badura-Skoda). The young pianist fascinates her audience with strong stage presence and deeply felt playing. On this recording she presents herself with an expressive Schubert album. The promising young German pianist Julia Rinderle fascinates her audience with a strong stage presence and highly sensitive and profound playing. After her recital at the famous Kaisersaal in Ottobeuren, Germany, she was praised as an 'enchantress of the piano' with a 'flush of sounds and colours'.

The arpeggione, invented in 1823 by the Viennese luthier Johann Georg Stauffer, had a curious destiny. As its alternative names ‘guitar violoncello’ and ‘guitare d’amour’ suggest, it is in fact a guitar fitted with a bridge, held between the knees like a cello and played with a bow. The instrument enjoyed some success for around a decade, but, oddly enough, almost nothing has survived from its specific repertory except one supreme masterpiece: the sonata Franz Schubert wrote for it in 1824. The guitar was very popular in Vienna at that time, and Schubert was also fond of it; the original version of Die schöne Müllerin was published with guitar accompaniment! Guido Balestracci and the musicians of L’Amoroso have built a delightful Schubertiad around this famous sonata, combining the arpeggione and the piano with voice and guitars to appropriate a rich selection of the Viennese composer’s lieder.

Schubert sits at the piano in a bourgeois salon in Vienna, surrounded by around 30 ladies and gentlemen applauding him. The painting by Julius Schmidt dating from 1897 captures one of those convivial musical gatherings known even during the composer’s lifetime as Schubertiades. The term was probably coined by Schubert’s friend Franz von Schober, and the first of these gatherings took place in January 1821 in Schober’s Vienna apartment. From then on, until the composer’s death in 1828, the Schubertiades were held on a regular basis with different hosts from Schubert’s circle, and always proceeded in a similar manner: Schubert played either piano solos or accompanied a singer, and usually presented new works; the guests read poetry and fiction to each other and exchanged ideas; a snack was then served, and this was frequently followed by an evening of dancing or even joint gymnastic exercises. The ritual also included Schubert going out on the town with his inner circle at the end of the evening.